Buy the thing, don’t give the cash

Harry is asked for money constantly and his answer is usually the same: buy the thing instead. Not because he assumes the worst of the person asking — he says the reason plainly, that he doesn’t know where cash goes and does know where a meal goes.

The rule cuts both ways and he is honest about the part that doesn’t work: what you buy gets you asked for another one.

How Harry applies it

In Karachi, on his first trip, children asking him for money at an ice cream shop got ice cream — five of them, and he says exactly why: he isn’t sure where money would go, so he bought the thing it would have been spent on. He doesn’t pretend it settled anything. The moment they had it, they asked for more.

In Port Moresby, five years later, he breaks his own rule and narrates himself doing it. Nobody in the settlement is wearing shoes, so he offers a man a pair, walks him to the shop — and there are no usable shoes in it. He hands over 100 kina instead. He says immediately afterwards that the money will go on betel nut and beer, that it was his own fault, and that he should have bought the shoes.

That pairing is the whole argument. The rule is easy to state and it fails at the exact moment the thing isn’t available to buy, which is when the cash comes out.

The related habit is the same idea running the other way: where someone has done something for him, he carries something to give back — cigarettes in Papua New Guinea — rather than producing money after the fact.

Demonstrated in

• Foreigners try Pakistani food 🇵🇰 — ice cream for five children instead of the money they asked for, and the request that follows it.
• How Dangerous is Papua New Guinea Really? — the shoes that weren’t in the shop, the 100 kina he handed over instead, and his own verdict on it.